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Co-located with the 14th International Conference on Formal Ontology in Information Systems (FOIS 2024) 
8-9 July 2024 (online) and 15-19 July 2024 (Enschede, Netherlands)

Artificial Intelligence (AI), Knowledge Modeling (KM) and Information Extraction (IE) methods are increasingly important for many sub-domains of legal informatics, including ontologies, argumentation, natural language processing, and network analysis, possibly paired with a multilingual approach. The Knowledge Management and process mining for Law (KM4LAW) workshop intends to be a forum to focus on legal informatics from different perspectives.

The advanced developments in AI over recent years have meant that seemingly insurmountable problems in AI & Law are beginning to be addressed. Accordingly, it is necessary to identify the limits of automated systems and how such systems can handle the remaining unsolved intentional and unintentional ambiguities and conflicts that require legal interpretation. Therefore, research works on the limits and unexplored opportunities offered by AI for the representation of knowledge in the legal domain constitute worthwhile contributions for this workshop.

Typical goals may include: classification of legal sources, legal design and legal ontologies, similarity between legal decisions and clustering, process mining for legal compliance, mining legal event logs for process discovery, prediction and support during judicial decision making, legal interpretation support, identification of evolution of legal concepts and definitions over time, information extraction and classification, detection of linguistic phenomena and patterns in legal sources, multilingual alignments of concepts on domestic and international legal sources, identification of legal references and network analysis, analogical reasoning, and compliance checking.

A recent research line is engaged with transformers and Large Language Models (LLMs) techniques applied in the legal domain. These models are becoming integral to legal work, as they have demonstrated effectiveness in several tasks, encompassing manifold research lines.  These include, but are not limited to, the design and evaluation of LLM-based systems and applications in legal data processing; the use of LLMs in conventional legal text processing tasks such as summarization, question-answering, classification, and judgement prediction; issues related to LLMs-enabled decision making; and the application of LLMs in the analysis of multilingual legal data.

Amongst other subjects, we include into the research topics the analysis of legal event logs through Process Mining (PM) techniques, i.e. for regulatory compliance checking, mining legal event logs for process discovery, and applying predictive process monitoring on legal cases.The Knowledge Management and process mining for Law (KM4LAW) workshop intends to be a forum to focus on legal informatics from a broad perspective.

Motivation 

The academic interest in legal informatics has been increasing over the last decades. The application of innovative technologies for processing legal documents and AI methods applied to legal issues can support the work of public administrations and private companies in the legal field. Informatics facilitates access to and understandability of legal knowledge, including judgments, recommendations, legislation, citizens’ constitutional rights, and soft law. Moreover, organisations’ information systems collect information related to notices and other legal documents, and are increasingly used for automated analysis with discovery and flow compliance checking, process mining with structured and unstructured data. Legal ontologies, for instance, highlight the nature of links between legal norms; the application of specific algorithms supports semi-automatic interpretation of legal provisions and prediction of judicial decisions.

Digital justice and digital law improve the daily work of public administrations, judges and law firms by speeding up the resolution of legal issues, including support for legal compliance and access to complex and extensive legal knowledge. Likewise, the digitalization of law has a socio-political impact by making legal knowledge accessible to a broader audience of citizens, increasing the opportunity to express themselves, and raising awareness of prominent legal issues. 

The Knowledge Management and process mining for Law (KM4LAW) workshop intends to be a forum to focus on legal informatics from a broad perspective.

This workshop focuses on the wide-ranging topic of Knowledge Management methods in the legal informatics and legal-linguistics fields. AI & Law involves a variety of sub-domains, including ontologies, argumentation, legal design, legal prediction, network analysis, and neural networks. The challenging task of automatically extracting knowledge in textual documents has traditionally been addressed by NLP techniques. Given the complexity and vagueness of legal sources, extracted knowledge can be formalised into ontological models for many purposes, including access to rights and understandability of requirements in administrative procedures. 

The growing interest in transformers and Large Language Models for legal analysis can explore a variety of legal tasks, including sentence-level annotation of legal texts, examination of digital evidence, and even contract drafting. The versatility of LLMs in the legal domain underscores their potential for transformative applications, raising both opportunities and considerations for their integration into legal practice. Despite warnings from the U.S. Federal judiciary and guidelines set by the European Bar Association, these models are becoming integral to legal work. For instance, GPT models have demonstrated effectiveness in statutory reasoning and exhibited their ability to successfully undergo the Uniform Bar Examination (UBE).

In addition, the analysis of legal event logs can be developed through the adoption of Process Mining (PM) techniques, which allow the discovery of procedures from real data, to verify the regulatory compliance of procedures, for application monitoring and prediction techniques about the events of a legal case.

This workshop is intended to be a forum bringing together all these sub-disciplines. FOIS is the perfect venue for this forum because all these subjects are involved in this conference

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PREVIOUS EDITIONS

2nd edition
KM4LAW – The Knowledge Management for Law workshop
Co-located with the 13th International Conference on Formal Ontology in Information Systems (FOIS 2023)
July 17-20, 2023 (Sherbrooke, Québec, Canada)
CFP KM4LAW 2023PROGRAM KM4LAW 2023 ORGANIZATION KM4LAW 2023

1st edition
KM4LAW – The Knowledge Management for Law workshop
23rd International Conference on Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management
26-29 September 2022 – Bozen-Bolzano, Italy
CFP KM4LAW 2022PROGRAM KM4LAW 2022 ORGANIZATION KM4LAW2022

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Special Issue 2022 – KM4LAW